A powerful, terrible story told in exacting detail. (14 b&w photos, 2 maps).
A defining episode in the career of the martial prima donna, dispassionately examined by British military historian Connaughton (The Battle for Manila, not reviewed).
MacArthur, the favored son of a general, always looked upon his own image and found it good. After graduating at the top of his West Point class, he began service in 1903 in the Philippines, whence he wrote fawning messages to superiors much in the style of Uriah Heep. Quickly rising in the ranks, he even had the effrontery to steal the affections of Black Jack Pershing’s mistress, while later on during the Depression he broke up with great zeal the hungry veterans of the Bonus Army when they marched into Washington. During his putative retirement, MacArthur, sporting many ribbons and a baton, became field marshal of the Philippine military—and assumed command of all US forces in the region when WWII broke out. Undeniably brilliant, he and his five-star vanity caused vexed relations with President Quezon, subordinates like Eisenhower and Wainwright, the US Navy, and the US government in general. Most of Connaughton’s text analyzes the archipelago’s military predicament, and, despite his assertions of MacArthur’s mastery of the situation, it’s made plain that his reaction to Pearl Harbor was dilatory and confused. Exhausted forces (ill-equipped, ill-trained, ill-served, and ill-led) sought refuge in doomed Bataan and Corregidor—where they subsisted on half-, then quarter-rations until the cavalry horses had to be butchered. Throughout, MacArthur filed reports that only lightly resembled reality. Before escaping from the scene of the awful defeat, the Potentate of the Pacific secured a considerable emolument from the Philippine government. The historic rout may not have been all his fault, but he sure didn’t help either. Connaughton’s report ends with the famous vow: “I shall return.” Which he did.
A powerful, terrible story told in exacting detail. (14 b&w photos, 2 maps).Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58567-118-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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